Reflective enquiries into the rich problematic of novel’s theoretical paradigms ranges from Lukacs’s historical understanding of novelistic form to the novel as a representation of a decentred thinking self’s struggles with forces that move within the being as well as outside. Many obituaries have been dedicated to the death of novel as a genre but it has managed to outlive all such suggestions by shapeshifting its sensibilities to articulate thinking self’s angst and probe its relationship with elusive time, remote myths, and tangible as well as intangible struggles across different periods in history.

Since the turn of twentieth century, strategies of engagement with the novelistic form range from Luka?s’ idea of “taste” as a sociological reduction with concomitant cultural debates to interpretations of it as autonomous means of imparting unconditioned literary insights through “defamiliarization” (Shklovsky). While theoretical schools of Structuralism and Phenomenology have also proposed thematic, symbolic, and structural interpretations of this form, within postmodernity fiction entails infinite creative capacity to destabilize the established standards of high and low art (for example, dichotomy of literary fiction and popular or genre fiction) thereby challenging conventional criteria of its reception. Nimbus of the novel, here, remains incomplete without the experiential fusion of reader’s reflection and feelings. The readership reclaims art through a self-reflexive, and yet, pluralistic openness that is anti-essentialist enough to suspend its adherence to one particular form. As a stakeholder in the creative process the reader, as inferred by Barthes, is free to engage with a text within the binaries of pleasure and bliss where pleasure entails understanding and enjoyment of the text while bliss is interpreted to be a disconcerting emotion that unsettles his given presuppositions. Bliss therefore unfolds the creative potentialities of the text even further by allowing the reader a space for infinite experiment as he breaks away from all kinds of ideological constructions. The uniqueness of meaning and form revitalizes the way reader is admitted in the exploration of novel’s aesthetics.

Interdisciplinarity and self-critical irony within the postmodern thought generate perspectives on the social, political, and economic concerns that structure its modes of aesthetic experience. It has warranted pertinent questions on the large scale technological advancement as well as mass-market reproduction of art calibrating them with ponderings on the value of art in all its upcoming forms. Hence, the current call for papers focuses on postmodern thought’s aesthetic orientation towards novels where aesthetics not only functions as a ground for engaging and exploring experiential world but also is an index of its relation with its fictional form.

All scholarly engagements in relation to the main theme are welcome. Some suggested topics are as below:

Aesthetics of literarinessNovel and aesthetic experienceAesthetics of postmodernist novelPopular/Genre fiction and counterculturePopular fiction and remote mythsReification of genresContesting hegemonic binariesAutonomy of textSubjectivity in the novelNovel and existential angstArt for art’s sakeOnly complete papers will be considered for publication. The papers need to be submitted according to the latest guidelines of the MLA format. You are welcome to submit full papers (not less than 3500 words) along with a 150 words abstract, list of keywords, bio-note, and word count on or before 1st February, 2018. We appreciate authors sending us early submissions.

All necessary author guidelines can be found at – http://www.ellids.com/author-guidelines/. Please email your submissions and queries to – llids.journal@gmail.com.